Though he is only
two inches taller than me, his girth is twice my own, and his weight
more than double.

I look at these
rail-thin men on the street and I wonder, how could I lay in bed next
to something as small as that? How would I ever feel comforted by their
small-boy embrace?

When he enfolds
me I almost vanish. His arms are thick and heavy, and once he’s asleep,
almost impossible to move. His belly warms the small of my back and
fills in all the space between us so there is no point at which we lose
contact. I sleep curled like a fetus, my toes barely extending beyond
his knees, and when I look down I see his feet poking out from under
the covers, two rough loaves of bread.

My aunt, the beauty
queen from Texas who could have any man she wanted, also chose someone
enormous. She loved his wit, his heart, his songs, and she wanted to
keep him as long as she could, so when she caught him eating steak she
became angry. My mother told her to leave him alone—“He’s a grown man!
Let him eat what he wants!”—but when he died two months later from heart
attack I wonder if my mother regretted her words.

My husband and
I tell each other that he is a bear and I am a bird. When we walk on
crowded sidewalks I take advantage of my size to weave around the people—and
then look behind to find I’ve lost him and have to circle back. “Little
bird, you forget I can’t fly,” he once said.

He wants to lose
weight. Every eight months or so the fire is lit anew and he swears
that this time it will be different, this time he will lose pounds instead
of resolve. And then he suffers through low-fat, low-calorie diets;
he drinks gallons of water; he consumes boneless skinless chicken breasts
in every conceivable way; he eats dressing-less salads three times a
day. As he falls asleep, he moans to me, “I’m hungry.” And
then he dreams about great feasts with cheeses and olives and large
roasts with crispy, crackled skin and wakes up feeling guilty.

Some mornings I
will wake to find a jar of peanut butter has gone missing. Or that the
six-pack of diet ice-cream bars we purchased just the day before is
lying empty on the counter. He is never good at covering his tracks
and I don’t want to scold him. Never come between a bear and his food,
you know. Instead, I’ll quietly break the box down and throw it away.
But the next time we’re in the grocery store and he lingers over the
ice-cream section I will hear myself say, “Are you sure that’s a good
idea?” and he will know that I know and he will hang his head low and
we’ll move on to the next aisle.

I hate it when
he does that. Or rather, I hate that my words have done that to him.
He is larger than life, on a different scale than the rest of us, and
I can’t stand to see him diminished in any way. And I love to watch
him eat. I think it was that first burrito that made me fall in love:
the shy unwrapping of the foil, strip by silver strip, until the naked
tortilla emerged and he took it in his mouth, eager but gentle, like
its contents were something precious.

Will you laugh
if I say I wanted to be that burrito?

A bear in the wild
learns to eat as much as possible when the eating’s good; winter will
take care of any excess weight. A bear in the city, a bear with a credit
card, a bear with a job and a human face—no winter’s coming for his
belly.

After another diet
failed and a shared orgy of brownies and ice cream, I lay across his
perfect belly and sighed. “Oh, bear . . . what are we going to do with
you?” I asked.

Jean-Michele
Gregory,
a New York-based director, works with solo performers and writers to
create works based on autobiographical material. Over the past decade
she has directed productions at the Public Theater, Cherry Lane, Berkeley
Rep, ACT Theatre, Intiman,
Performance Space 122, the Spoleto Festival, American Repertory Theatre,
and many more. She is currently at work on a memoir about her family’s
exodus from eastern Poland and what it means to forgive.